Big First Day Roaming Kyoto

In pre-trip planning for Kyoto, we came up with a rough list of things we wanted to do. It provided a nice backbone for once we are on the ground to play things by ear with some ideas in our pocket.

The forecast for the day was thunderstorms. The actual weather was blue skies and sunshine. Simply beautiful. We started the day by purchasing a 2-day bus/subway pass for 2,000 yen each. Again, we had great success purchasing this from a machine without assistance. The rest of the day was spent ping ponging around town on public transit—which was stunningly easy to navigate.

Highlights of the day were: doing laundry (!), four different temples and gardens, kaiten-zushi for lunch, fish chewing on our feet at a spa (!!), and tonkatsu for dinner.

It was a uniquely Japanese day—a nice day it was. I'm going to group this first day up into common themes, rather than writing totally chronological. To be honest, we simply aren't going to be able to maintain the same level of excitement as earlier reports on baby gorillas. Regardless, hopefully you'll stick around for these last few dispatches, and find some nugget of entertainment value in them…